At 20:37 29/01/2003 -0500, Jack wrote: It seems to us that this >enhancement should be one that is taken up by the makers of the cluster >software. Not only does it help reduce unwanted traffic on the net or VHF >connection, it also reduces unwanted traffic within the cluster software >itself thereby making the cluster software less burdened.
Most cluster software allows for some pretty powerful filtering but filtering by comments isn't something I have seen yet. I KNOW that the cluster software I run (Dxnet) can't do this but as it's open source I guess it's a possibility in the future. The custom (here anyway) is to spot beacons as OX3SIX/B instead of just OX3SIX so filtering for /B would be better at the cluster than looking for beacon in the body of the text. I do however find beacon spots useful. >If we provided a filter for all the cases that have been mentioned, there >would be a noticeable slowdown in processing incoming spots. I think everyone missed the bit in my post where I pointed out how to exclude beacon posts in most cases using the existing Dxbase mode filters. You just change the bandplan mapping to put beacons in the bandplan for a mode you don't use (say RTTY ) or even leave beacon part of the entirely out of the bandplan, once you have done this you can use the DXbase mode filters to exclude the beacon band if that's what you want If you configure the 6m bandplan to start the CW section at 50080 for example this will exclude almost all beacon spots. >Nothing that >couldn't be overcome, but in the end one does have to ask whether it is >appropriate to do this after the fact rather than stopping it at the source. As someone who runs a cluster I would always prefer the user to use the cluster filters to exclude unwanted modes and bands as this reduces VHF packet traffic and to this end I assist users with setting up filters. 73 Brendan EI6IZ
